No more waiting!!

Ok... so, all the fingernail chewing has come to an abrupt halt. The prayers, chants, sprinklings of chocolate milk, or whatever it is that you people do have paid off. Thank you!

Our house is tiny. Wait. I don't think you heard me... tiny. There are five of us, sometimes seven, occupying a whole seven hundred square feet. With two cats. To say we are a close family is just a bit too literal for my taste.

We've wanted to move since forever ago. We had hoped that by this summer we would be ready, but things just haven't quite gone the way we had hoped and planned for, so we accepted that it would be another year before we could move. Fine.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who I used to work with stopped by school to say hi. She had retired last year and was dabbling in real estate. I promised her that when we were ready, we would definitely enlist her services. When I saw her recently, I promised her that we had not gone with someone else, that actually, we wouldn't be able to move for another year. We chatted a bit, talking about how good the market is for buyers and stuff. She asked what we were looking for, I described it and she told me that she'd have a peek around, see what appeared and if nothing else, we could just make a Saturday afternoon of it, looking at houses that Steve and I could never afford and have a drink or six.

One week later, we were putting an offer on our 'dream' home. Yep. That fast. The house was in the first list she sent us, we had a look and fell in love. My friend sent us to a mortgage broker, we thought, "Sure!" We'll go for giggles and see how fast their heads spin before turning us down.

We were pre-approved for the asking price on the spot. Wha??? Huh???? Yep.

Speeding this up a bit... we didn't get the 'dream' home, but that's ok. Because, it would have been stretching our budget to the absolute max. We knew we wanted to buy a foreclosure because we could get more house for our buck, plus we really want something we can fix up and put ourselves in to. This was the 'nail biting' and 'still waiting' posts (eek! look at that grammar!!! oh well - I'm tired!)

Made an offer on house number two. This house had been on the market for almost a year, had been reduced, so we felt pretty confident. Silly us! Another offer (out of four!) had been accepted just before we put ours in.

By this time, I'm pretty crispy and thinking the hell with it... we had planned to stay here another year, what the hell? I was done.

Sunday night, just as we were going to bed, Steve found a house that looked interesting. The short version is that by lunchtime on Monday, he had seen it and was prepared to make an offer but he wanted me to see it first. I went to have a look after work, fell absolutely in love, as well, and we called our realtor to get the offer ready.

I didn't get my hopes up. What was the point???

Guess what???

Not a very good suspense writer, am I???

We got the house!!! They accepted our offer today, dickered with our earnest money a bit, which we played along. We will be closing on or about the 15th of May!!!!

Here it is...




Now, if you have even the slightest bit of 'good vibe juice' left that you could spare for us, we absolutely HAVE to sell this wonderful house we're living in at the moment :)